It’s a sad reflection on society when scammers find a successful way of tricking people into clicking on their links is to offer them a video of a rollercoaster accident.

This weekend Facebook users have seen their online friends seemingly pass around links claiming to point to video footage of theme park accidents in either Alton Towers in the UK, Summertime Theme Park Australia, or Universal Studios in Hollywood.

OMG! Theme Park accident in Alton Towers United Kingdom

Rollercoaster Accident in United KingdomCheck this @: [LINK]This has just been leaked!

Clicking on any of the links takes you through the familiar process of approving a rogue application, that will then post the same message to your own Facebook wall, and attempt to trick you into taking an online survey that earns money for the scammers.

You should remember that if there was a real news story like this you would never have to approve a third party Facebook application to learn more about it – you could simply visit a legitimate news website.

At the time of writing, Facebook security has shut down the offending link – but it’s possible that the cybercriminals could return with a new version.

If you’ve been affected by this scam (more details of which is available on the website of our friends at Facecrooks), you should clean up your account before any further damage is done.

I’ve made a YouTube video where I show you how to clean-up your Facebook account if you were hit by this, or similar scams on Facebook:

Make sure that you stay informed about the latest scams spreading fast across Facebook and other internet attacks. Join the Sophos Facebook page, where more than 170,000 people regularly share information on threats and discuss the latest security news.

Post navigation

About the author

Graham Cluley runs his own award-winning computer security blog, and is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and gives computer security presentations. Follow him on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/gcluley">@gcluley</a>.

I am sick of seeing these facebook scams show up on my friend's walls (which means they keep showing up on my "Most Recent" page, which is why I "liked" Sophos in the hopes that some of my friends would get the hint.

There REALLY annoying everyone posts them on my facebook and it bugs me but my friend filled the survey in and they took £3,000 pounds out of her bank account! she was soooo annoyed! so DONT fill them in.

The thousands of scam articles on Facebook are obvious…the majority of them start with OMG! Or half way through the comment they write in capital letters. I can't think of anyone on my friends list who writes like that to be honest and the majority of articles are claiming to show footage of something that would probably be all over the news so the chances of you discovering it on Facebook are pretty small. If anyone goes through the entire process of adding an application, agreeing that it can see your information and completing a survey just to read an article then they're asking for it really!

all of my friends sent me this and I just said its spam it would be on the news if it was real, but they're so gullable, and im not kidding one of my friends didn't know what spam was :L she literally thought i meant spam as in meat lol. anyway I checked here and found this. sorry for poor grammar and spelling I am in a bit of a rush.

Can anyone post how to remove this. Has no X to do so, and I never opened it. Came from a friend, so went to delete it, but it didnt work, and ever since its been going round as if from me to all my friends. Very annoying.

Said Alton Towers crash on mine which came up just a couple of hours ago *rolls eyes* should have realised- my friend NEVER uses grammer or capital letters when typing or says OMG haha! XD Didn't click it though *phew* These scammers are complete morons. Imagine making one of those? Hope they feel guilty and do something worthwhile with themselves. Thanks for the article! 🙂

omg i just got one, but it had my friends picture on it… then they sent another mesg saying "have u seen it yet i couldnt watch all of it!"… thats a horrible thing to do, i though my mate sent it?… but maybe there just using ur friends pictures so u will open the mesg??? not sure really

i didn't know these idiot scammers could also put a comment in underneath the article, as i have just seen this myself, but as the above comment states, my friends also said " have you seen it yet, i couldn't watch all of it".. how do they keep going on like this when i thought facebook has these removed?? I knew as soon as i seen it, it was a virus, but was quite shocked at the fact, it states a comment underneath from the friends name..so wrong..

"You should remember that if there was a real news story like this you would never have to approve a third party Facebook application to learn more about it – you could simply visit a legitimate news website"

Unfortunately plenty of newspaper apps now require you to approve them before you can follow links to their stories.

I just like the helpful info you supply for your articles. I will bookmark your weblog and test again right here frequently. I am moderately sure I’ll be informed many new stuff right here! Best of luck for the following!